Passionate about technology, people, new places and especially the possibilities of the future – here you will find the musings and antics of Jason Blackman (blckmn).

Getting started A new (or not so new) plugin for Visual Studio Code (VSCODE) is available that makes debugging the Cortex line of MCUs a breeze. It is called Cortex-Debug by Marcel Ball (Marus). The best thing about Cortex-Debug is it is OSS as well (Github Repo). For those who don’t know VSCODE is a…

Getting started Previously I have written about building and debugging using Visual Studio and the VisualGDB add-on for windows. This time around I have been able to get the Visual Studio Code – a free and opensource IDE – working with OpenOCD and the GNU ARM tool chain. First step is to download and install…

So we have talked about DSHOT a lot lately and so far it has proven to be quite the upstart. Whilst there are other options, such as CAN (Controller Area Network), here I will highlight the possibility of yet another digital protocol for ESC communications. What is wrong with DSHOT? Nothing really. There is of…

As it turns out the three speeds for DSHOT culminating in DSHOT 600 (more info in a prior post here) is not the end of it. A new speed has been added to the DSHOT list in the latest release candidates for Betaflight 3.1. It is now twice as fast as DSHOT 600, and so…

A while back I wrote about how to modify the XSR (aka X4RS) to get at the non-inverted smartport signal so as to work with the STM32 F1 and F4 based flight controllers (F3, and F7 have the ability to invert serial communications built in). Well this is part two of that modification. The original…

What is DSHOT? DSHOT is the name coined for a new digital ESC protocol by Felix (KISS) who is working in collaboration with Boris and the rest of the betaflight team, and Steffen (BLHeli) is also playing his part and introducing this protocol to BLHeli_S. Make no mistake (despite what some have said) although this…

VisualGDB is a powerful embedded add on for Visual Studio for developing for micro-controllers such as the ARM based STM32 series from ST Microelectronics. This post shows how to setup your environment for building the popular Cleanflight, Betaflight or Raceflight flight controller firmware for multi-rotors. Once setup building and debugging software for these micro-controllers gains…

The Frsky XSR – also known as the X4RS (rev1) – is a new Receiver from FrSky that is super light and small, and gives you up to 16 channels for a drone. It uses the dreaded smartport for telemetry though as does all the X series from Frsky. This mod applies to X4R-SB also…

Whilst recently participating in a panel for CXO Disrupt I was asked an interesting question on whether or not innovation is limited to areas where a certain high level of risk is deemed acceptable. The examples provided in the question for areas of high risk on an aircraft included entertainment systems and other such accessories….

Let us make an assumption, or rather a pretty good prediction. Driver-less vehicles will become the new normal and will be sharing the road with us within the next five years. This will lead to all sorts of disruption. Take the taxi industry for example. It won’t exist as it does today in the driver-less…